Indigenous Peoples’ Day: The Importance of Healing and Gratitude
And Re-introducing Two Timely BCM Publications
18th Sunday after Pentecost
This Sunday’s RCL gospel reading (Lk 17:11-19) is a straightforward object lesson about gratitude for gifts of healing. It is an important reminder for those of us trying to face and heal deep wounds past and present, not least in this fraught historical moment.
As we approach Indigenous Peoples’ Day 2025, we want to remind you of two key resources that we’ve published, books which were designed to inspire and equip people of faith to navigate challenging times.
i) Healing Haunted Histories: A Settler Discipleship of Decolonization (Cascade, 2021) was forged during the first Trump administration, and based on multiple hands-on workshops. It has been used by groups and individuals across the U.S., Canada and Australia to face the deepest personal and political wounds of colonization. Dr. Nathan Stucky of Princeton Theological Seminary called this book “just the right voices, just the right encouragement, and just the right challenge at just the right time.” As we near its fifth anniversary, use the discount code HHHEV325 to purchase copies at 40% off here through Oct 13 (Indigenous Peoples’ Day)!
As you may know, Elaine and a team of collaborators have been working hard developing and producing study and facilitation resources to broaden and deepen the reach of HHH. They’ve been aiming for a launch on Indigenous Peoples Day for a Facilitator’s Guide, nine videos and a Participant’s Workbook. Though they won’t make
that, they are on track to make these available before the end of the year! (Above: Facilitator’s Guide cover, designed by Tim Gibbs-Zehnder.) So this is a good time to start planning for a study and practice group for 2026! We’ll keep you posted when these resources are released.
ii) Our God is Undocumented: Biblical Faith and Immigrant Justice (Orbis Books, 2012) is still one of the best primers on this longstanding justice issue, which has emerged as the central struggle against the new Trump regime. Ched offers five seminal studies of scripture’s deeply-rooted ethos of solidarity with the sojourner, the refugee, and the outsider, while Matt Colwell profiles five exemplary gospel practitioners of immigrant justice. “This book will help shape the theological discourse about immigration in our churches,” wrote Presbyterian organizer Ricardo Moreno, “and hopefully the political discourse in our society at large.” (See the Englewood Review of Books’ take here.)
Amidst the deepening Trumpian war on immigrants of all kinds, this is a key resource for understanding history, context, and faith (its second Appendix planted seeds for the deeper dive of Healing Haunted Histories!). So help us reach folks in the growing ecclesial immigrant rights movement (it was featured recently at a major Catholic gathering on the subject in New York). Better yet, order the book from Orbis here and gift copies around!
We hope you’ll make use of these resources as we engage in a pitched battle with those selling the gospel out to fascism. May we learn gratitude and practice healing with our Indigenous and immigrant kin.
Next week, I’ll return to the final weeks of my reflections on HARP!
